I came in through the sliding doors before they finished parting, and everyone here is doing the opposite of me: they are staying. Rows of them, pinned to chairs bolted to the floor, holding the same rigid shape for hours, a stillness so total I keep checking them for breath.
One man rolls a set of car keys over and over in his hand like they might turn into an answer. A woman has folded a paper cup flat, unfolded it, folded it again. Nobody looks up when I move the loose corner of a magazine.
I lifted a smell off a coat as I passed, cold air and cigarette and somewhere far outside, cut grass, and I set it down two seats over onto a girl who did not notice she'd been given the outdoors. I stirred the hair at the back of a boy's neck.
He didn't flinch. They have gone somewhere I can't follow, all of them, deep inside the waiting, watching the double doors the way I have never watched anything, because I have never needed a thing to come back through a door.
That is the part I keep pressing against and cannot get through: they are here because something they love is on the other side of a wall, and walls are the one thing I've never learned. I go around. I go under the door in a thin cold line. I do not know how to hold my breath outside a room and hope.
The vents pushed me out before I understood any of it. I took the cut-grass smell back with me, and the sound of a name being called, and I'll set them down on a hillside that won't know where they came from either.